Ride the inaugural CaBis: Capital Bikeshare's launch is Monday the 20th. DDOT and Arlington are organizing an inaugural ride starting at USDOT near the Navy Yard at 10:30 and riding bikes for the first time to stations all over. Email Megan.Kanagy@dc.gov to sign up to participate. David will be leading one of the rides. (CommuterPageBlog)

Estimate your transportation costs: Abogo, from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, estimates how much you'll have to spend on transportation living in any particular neighborhood. DC's rents look good when you consider that transportation in the District is a comparative bargain. (Eric Fidler via Planetizen)

Trans-Hudson tunnel halted: The Access to the Region's Core rail tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan, the country's largest stimulus-funded project, was halted abruptly late last week, ostensibly to review finances. (Transportation Nation)

Erik Weber has been living car-free in the District since 2009. Hailing from the home of the nation's first Urban Growth Boundary, Erik has been interested in transit since spending summers in Germany as a kid where he rode as many buses, trains and streetcars as he could find. Views expressed here are Erik's alone.

Comments

We estimate total transportation costs for an average household from your region living in your neighborhood, including commuting, errands, and all the other trips around town. We count money spent on car ownership and use, as well as public transit use. For CO2 emissions, we count car use only.

Why don't they count emissions from busses? Do the power plants supplying electricity for mass transit have zero emissions?

Yikes. The trans-Hudson tunnel is a pretty big deal, and if cancelled will be disastrous for that region. Just more proof that these multiple-jurisdiction projects are horribly structured. Chris Christie is the latest in a very long line of appallingly bad governors of New Jersey.

Yeah I don't know about that Abogo site. While the colors on the map probably represent a good interpretation of how much people pay for transportation, it also assumes everyone owns a car and factors car ownership costs into the monthly "cost of living" I live in Ballston and it says my cost is over $700 a month! That's about $600 too much.

Are there any stats on DC's Drunk Driving sentencing? I actually know a guy who crashed his car driving drunk and killed his passenger. I blinked and he was out of jail. I don't expect this drunk driver in Adams Morgan to be spending much time behind bars either. How does DC rank among other states of tough sentencing?

@Froggie Yes. The station placement was awful in the project as it was designed, although my understanding was that construction would essentially progress linearly from the New Jersey side into New York.

By the time the tunnel reached New York, people had hoped that the Penn Station people would have gotten their act together to allow through-running, and integration with the existing station.

Still: A bad tunnel is heavily preferable to no tunnel. The orange line crunch is nothing compared to what happens when one of the two Hudson tubes is forced to close.

@andrew, New Jersey intends for its Federally-funded tunnel to dead-end 180 feet underground. The depth precludes through connections to Manhattan's existing tracks, which are near the surface.

This is of concern to GreaterGreaterWashington because the New Jersey bottleneck delays our trips to and from New York. And the $9 billion "tunnel to nowhere" might not help. It's not for us, and it might not even get NJers off the old tracks if they prefer keeping their Manhattan connections.

The big, mysterious disappointment is that the Feds approved the project.

Yes--the THE/ARC tunnel dead-end design is extremely stupid. Spending that amount of money to run more tracks into Manhattan, then dead-end deep underground without good connections to existing transit, or even the surface, would be incredibly dumb. NYC desperately needs another tunnel, but it should connect to Penn Station so that it will actually increase capacity/redundancy on the NEC. The National Association of Railroad Passengers has long been advocating for this. They could use our support.

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